Left of Familiar
by Jux
Summary: Hermes just can't be interesting. Desire cannot be bored.


Luck.   
  
And the word just waited, gambler's paradise. Miracle waiting to happen.   
  
Accident of a world that loves its own enough to give them things that sparkle.   
  
Dance like gem stones spun of sugar, gleaming in the night.   
  
Hermes waited, perched on the edge of nothing at all, grinning for all the world.   
  
"Do you -have- to kick your feet?"   
  
He -.. She-... Desire, was simply, plainly gorgeous. It was not praise to say this. Hermes continued to smile, sandals flipping up and down in counterpoint to the wind. He did not say Desire was beautiful, even though it would not have been flattery. He did not say anything at all. "God you're boring."   
  
Smiling. "Coyote would have offered me a drink."   
  
Hermes could hear a dead man murmur in just the right way to announce himself lost. Hermes could see love in a serpent's eye. So if he sat, unmoved by the pique of Desire, it was not his senses to blame.   
  
It was also not his place to give drinks. Coyote could do what he pleased, stinking of death, a misplaced gene away from jakaldom. Some people had standards. Some duties.   
  
"Loki would at least talk."   
  
Desire was doing it on purpose. Naturally.   
  
Tricksters, were by nature her favorites.   
  
Hermes, by nature, the exception. Desire hated him. Like one hates ones youngest sibling. There's love in the backdrop sure, but you still broke their toys. Hermes knows what metaphor is, he holds his caduceus tighter.   
  
"Tezcatlipoca knows how to treat a.. knows how to treat me. He would wine me, dine me, let me hold his smoky mirror. You're boring." His sandals flop, loose, even laced. He hears nothing on the wind, he will not be saved by the call this time. It has happened before.  
  
"Here's where you say: 'God you're a bitch'"  
  
He doesn't.  
  
"Or you smile like you know it's getting to me, like its working and this is what you planned and the more you smile the more upset I'll get."  
  
He is still smiling. It is still not an answer, his face remains the same, his eyes are still re-reading the last of Zeus's missives in his head.   
  
"That's so unfair. Emote! Throw something at me! Hit me! GET SMUG!"  
  
He isn't, of course. She (feminine here, themes are only useful when needed) is still beautiful.   
  
"I'm going to take your dumb stick."  
  
Desire doesn't know if she created the Trickster. Years later, not years like 'im going to be able to drink legally' but years like 'that pesky icecap will be a lake', Jung will say there is one Trickster. One who stands in the minds of men (all men, women) and is bloody, wild, witty, remarkably Fertile, or potent..etc.. Desire sighs, in real time. She hopes desperately it is not Hermes.   
  
And then Desire laughs.  
  
"You're going to be an aspect of fertility!"   
  
God's don't blush, but they don't hide it well either. Blushing doesn't stop one from doing one's job. That is what Hermes is, by the by. A narrative slip.   
  
Loki is hate, chaos's fang and tooth. Coyote is opposite to the life maker, man's foe, trapper-biter-looseonthefields.   
  
Tezcatlipoca is introspection gone horribly awry. They are all so vague.   
  
Hermes delivers messages, takes the light from the eyes of the dead. Hermes kills giants by boring them to death. He is an errand boy. It isn't demeaning, it merely ends. Were he more threatened, he might explain.   
  
Desire knows. But she also knows who she is. She will not stop scratching at the scab.   
  
He came as near as he could to blushing. Progress is the balm of all wounds. Time has nothing on headway.   
  
She kisses him on the forehead, bites him on the neck, whispers something about having fun with toes.   
  
She stands to leave.   
  
He looks up. "Tezcatlipoca would never have let you talk this much."   
  
She isn't surprised, she swears it. Her response is the same color as her eyes, though it's a useless attribute. People won't see sound as color until the 90's, when they'll have words to describe afflictions that will cause it. Till then people are just crazy. But her response is white wine, aged overlong.   
  
"Tomorrow?"   
  
He gets up. It wasn't a nod. It wasn't a real question. 


End file.
